Lemondrop

» see lemondrop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Lemondrop came out of stealth in September 2008 as AOL's lifestyle site for women aged eighteen to thirty-four. The tagline was sweet.tasty.tart. The promise was an irreverent take on the subjects women's magazines had been covering earnestly for decades, written faster and posted more often, with the whole thing paid for by display advertising sold against the traffic.

The traffic arrived. comScore counted nearly 2.6 million unique visitors in October 2008, its second month, which put it in serious company almost immediately. AOL ran a holiday gift guide sponsored by a razor brand before the site was a quarter old. Alongside it sat Asylum, the men's version, built on the same logic pointed at the other half of the demographic chart.

Both were products of MediaGlow, AOL's plan to launch a large number of narrow branded sites and grow page views across all of them at once. It was a volume strategy, and by the standard it set for itself Lemondrop was working. Then the standard changed.

I read almost none of these. They were written for an American audience AOL could sell to American advertisers, and the search results that fed them were not the ones I got. What made them worth recording from here is the shape: a portal manufacturing eighty brands and cancelling them in a single meeting is something every large media company has now done at least once.

~ the case file ~

~ what mediaglow was ~

The idea was that a portal could not compete for attention as one enormous homepage, so it should compete as eighty small ones. Each site got its own name and its own vertical: food, parenting, gadgets, celebrity gossip, personal finance. Search engines would find them individually, advertisers could buy them individually, and AOL would sell the total.

It produced Slashfood and Luxist and DIY Life and PopEater and WalletPop and ParentDish, most of which are now dates in a shutdown announcement. The weakness was that a brand with two years of history and no audience loyalty is worth roughly what its last month of traffic is worth, and traffic that arrived through search does not follow a name anywhere.

~ the january call ~

Tim Armstrong had come from Google to run AOL in 2009, and by the start of 2011 he was buying the Huffington Post and rebuilding the content side around fewer, larger properties. On 5 January 2011 the reorganization reached the demographic sites. Asylum was to be shut by the end of the month. Lemondrop was to be absorbed into AOL's women's group, which is the softer phrasing for the same outcome.

Performance had very little to do with either closure. Asylum was reported as the number one site in the men's category on the day the decision came down. Both went because the company that built them had changed its mind about the strategy underneath, which produces a much shorter obituary than a product that actually failed.

~ the domain outlived the brand ~

lemondrop.com kept answering for most of a year after the editorial operation stopped. Archived captures show it serving pages through December 2011 and then redirecting away in January 2012. That gap is normal for this kind of death: the announcement kills the staffing, the URL keeps working until somebody gets round to the DNS.

The archive is not where the writing went, either. Some of it moved into AOL's remaining women's coverage under different bylines and different URLs, and the rest is only readable now through Wayback captures of a site that stopped being updated in January 2011.

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